Sunday, March 14, 2010

It is easy to lose your way on the road to permanent weight loss. Very easy to get stuck. When you want to lose much more than 25 pounds, it is a process that takes months, not weeks. As the weeks wear by, as the days droll on, it can be dreary, monotonous, annoying. And lonely. A journey not shared with others.

No matter how many pounds you lose there is always this fear that you will slip, and gain most of it back.

Of course there are those moments of joy when you reach one of your interim goals. Certainly there are rewards when others tell you that you're looking slimmer.

But in the alone minutes, in the times when so much is happening and you have to eat on the run, or over a pile of paperwork, it's tough to know what you are really doing – are you doing the right things? It's also easy to find a ton of excuses why this meal, this snack, this day, this week, etc., you have a very good reason not to eat like you know you should.
Permanent weight loss is more about what you feed your brain, than what you feed your body.

Permanent weight loss is more about your belief in your ability to do it, than it is in which program you use to do it.

Permanent weight loss is about learning to connect the dots between what you do each moment, and what happens to your body a year from now.

Permanent weight loss is about commitment to a principle and never backing down. It is about accepting that you don't do everything correctly, and don't do it every time – but you are doing it.

Permanent weight loss is visualizing your body the way it should be, then letting nothing, (including you momentarily falling off the path), stand in your way.

So how do you get there? How do you increase your motivation to make all that happen?

How do you achieve the never-fatigued inner resolve to let nothing stand in your way?

How do you get that day-to-day, moment-to-moment motivation drilled into you, pounded into you, convincingly persuaded into you, until you achieve your lifelong goal?

In other words...

...Where is the instruction manual to your weight loss motivation?

The short answer is...

There isn't any. At least none that any other person can tell you, or give to you.

The difficulty with weight loss motivation lies in its inherent contradiction:
a. You can only find the answer to the riddle of your motivational challenge within yourself
b. But you don't really trust yourself to stay motivated

What you don't realize is that your motivation is something that boils up from inside of you. It is not something imposed on you from the outside. It can't be. Besides, it is already there. Dormant. You just need to get all your blockage out of the way, to let your inner motivation escape into the open, then guide your daily actions.

Beset with a record of past weight loss failures, you doubt that is going to happen anytime soon. So you reach instinctively for someone else's opinion. A friend. An expert. A person who has successfully done it. Maybe even Oprah.

What you desperately want is a checklist. A crutch. A guide. A great video series. An inspirational book. A carefully structured way to "find" your everlasting motivation.

An outside guide to weight loss motivation that works, doesn't exist.

None of them. Never has. Never will. And those who tell you otherwise have something to sell you -- perhaps some modern-day snake oil. Or a large swamp outside of Las Vegas that just needs to be drained before you can build a billion dollar hotel on it.

Not that checklists and structured paths (those done with sensitivity and professional skill) can't take you a way down the path of lifting your motivation. A few can. The trouble is, they just can't get you to go all the way to your success. Because that can only come from deep inside you, and no one can tell you how to do that.

So, when these guru's get you part way there, and you ultimately fail, you blame it on yourself. Then you lose even more precious confidence in yourself -- and you had none to spare in the first place.

Reflect and find your way to weight loss motivation success.

Sustaining weight loss motivation, especially if you weigh 50 pounds or more than you should, is exceptionally difficult to maintain month after month using anyone's system. In part, that is because in the really tough moments that always happen, when the pressures can really get to you, you come to realize the "system" you have been relying on is NOT YOU TALKING TO YOU. And that gives you the perfect excuse to reject it. Once rejected, you can never again rely on it. It has been discredited. Then you are back to square one: impaired motivation, with nothing to replace it.

That is why you must find your own way to weight loss motivation.

The purpose of my book "How to Curb Your Appetite – And Stop Your Cravings" is to give you 36 different views of how others have done it successfully (feel free to get a free copy of this e-Book on the left navigation bar). None of them are your path. Nor were they intended to be. Their purpose is for you to seek some alone time to read them. Then reflect. Come back several days later, re-read a chapter, and think about it again.

Personal reflection, repeated often, is a re-building process. No single idea (or chapter) will get you far. No single idea is going to jump out of the page and smack you alongside your head, and have you say, "Eureka, now I've got it!"

As I look back at the faces and remember the stories of those who have been through the process you are going through now, every one of them will tell you that at some point they wanted to just shake me and say, "Laura, just tell me what to do, and I'll do it."

And, in the end, each one of them who made it through successfully now tell me, "Thank you Laura for not "giving" me answers. Thank you for making me think more carefully about myself. Thank you for having the patience to allow me to keep experimenting until I found my own unique way to stay motivated every day. Thank you that I now can trust myself, and know that I am the author of my own success."

Unknowingly, they were not thanking me. They were really just thanking themselves. They did all the interior work and deserve the full credit for their success.

There is NO roadmap to your weight loss motivational success.

Your success is who you already are. You need no map to take you somewhere. There is nowhere to go. Everything you need, everything you require, you already have. You just need to accept that. Then live it.

Reflect and learn one piece of your inner truth at a time. Each piece will build the mosaic of your future, your lifelong, your permanent, weight loss success.

If you want weight loss success, consider what you may not have considered, this way, before.